Kent posed the question whether the NetGear GS108T would solve his stuttering problem with HD and the XBOX and whether the SRW2008 I bought required any settings to be modified.

The GS108T might actually do the trick. The determining factor is said to be the size of the buffer memory in the device. The GS108T is listed as having “128kB per unit”. The GS108 I was using before lists “192kB on-chip buffering”.

Now the problem in comparing these two numbers is that the first might mean the device has a total of 1MB (8 ports x 128kB) and the second might mean a total of 192kB (Amazon lists 32kB per port, but the math there doesn’t add up with the specs (8 ports x 32kB = 256kB). I just don’t know if that’s the case, I can’t find solid info on that. But it doesn’t make sense that the cheaper non-smart model would have more memory.

As for the SRW2008, Linksys doesn’t make it easy to find the buffer memory size. I actually found it here:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/29915/51/1/9/

In the table at the end, the SRW2008 is listed as having 1MB of buffer memory. So if that means it’s a total of 1MB, then it has the same amount as the GS108T you are looking at (1024kB / 8 ports = 128kB per port). In short, I don’t have a simple answer to your question. If you do go with the GS108T, please let me know if it works.

One other thing to take into consideration with smart switches is that many of them have fans in them, often noisy. This is simply because these devices are meant for businesses and a living room. This shouldn’t be a problem with the GS108T, it’s listed with “Acoustic noise: 0dB”, so it shouldn’t have any fans.

As for configuring the Linksys SRW2008, I didn’t have to fiddle with the settings. All I did was set an IP and password for the device and left everything else at their defaults.

UPDATE: Kent bought a NetGear GS108T and it solved the stuttering he was seeing. Anyone else have switch models that have resolved the issue?

I'd been having the problem described on http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932345 when using my Xbox as a media center extender with Windows Vista on a gigabit network. The second workaround described in the article worked, but dropping my main machine to 100Mbps wasn't an acceptable long term solution. I finally got around to ordering a new switch that I was hoping would resolve the limitation of the Netgear GS108's 144kB buffer memory was causing. I ordered a Cisco/Linksys SRW2008 managed switch and luckily the problem was solved. I looked at several switches that have larger buffers, but most of the units that were anywhere in a reasonable price range had 16 ports and several fans. While the XBox is still noisy, the last thing I need is more fans in the living room. In addition, the other units also used about twice the power (30+ Watts) which is an unnecesary 24/7 cost I also wanted to avoid. The Linksys SRW2008 has eight ports and is rated at 14W.

As usual, use the following with extreme caution and at your own risk.

Version: DVRMSToolbox 1.215

Registry

The installer for DVRMSToolbox suffers from the WoW6432Node registry installation problem described on Aaron Stebner’s blog. In short, the required registry keys get written under the 32-bit portion and not the 64-bit which is read since Media Center runs as a 64-bit application host. Thus, the commercial skip add-in does not get started with Windows Media Center. The quick fix is to copy to required registry entries to the correct place in the registry.

Incorrect location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Extensibility

Correct location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Extensibility

Note the lack of “Wow6432Node” in the path.

There are several keys that need to be moved. Your best option is to export the originals using RegEdit, remove the “Wow6432Node” from the path an import the modified keys. This may work for other add-ins, too.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service]
"AlwaysUseFPD"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Extensibility\Categories\Background\{05b8fe4d-d3cf-4d63-944a-48a92114e0db}]
"AppId"="{a1465b9b-3216-4dd2-9760-e7d3a62abece}"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Extensibility\Applications\{a1465b9b-3216-4dd2-9760-e7d3a62abece}]
"Title"="Media Center Commercial Skip" 

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Extensibility\Entry Points\{05b8fe4d-d3cf-4d63-944a-48a92114e0db}]
"AppId"="{a1465b9b-3216-4dd2-9760-e7d3a62abece}"
"Description"="Skip commercials with DVRMSToolbox"
"AddIn"="babgVant.MediaCenter.CommercialSkipAddIn.CommercialSkip,CommercialSkipAddIn,Version=1.2.1.5,PublicKeyToken=c3a1371968f2ff2a,Culture=Neutral"
"Title"="DVRMSToolbox Commercial Skip"

MCESTATE Registration

The readme for the 1.215 version states “Added MceState registration check when launching dvrmstompegsettings, should address mcestate not registering properly on x64”. I believe this is an issue of not adding the required DLL(s) to the Global Assembly Cache, though I didn’t dig deeper into this issue since the solution was to simply start the DVRMStoMPEGSettings application.

PROPPAGE.DLL

Running DVRMStoMPEGSettings also gave me a warning about Proppage.dll not being registered. A little digging gave me the following information:

When proppage is registered the playing file is detected using the same method as in XP (using the published playback graph), and dvd bookmarking works a bit differently.  Instead of using metadata published by MC, DTB can read the source folder create the bookmark from that so multi-disc sets work correctly (TV series for e.g.).

Proppage.dll is not packaged with DVRMSToolbox for licensing reasons, but I happened to have the required Windows SDK installed in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1\Bin\x64 so I opened a Command Prompt as Administrator and ran “regsvr32 proppage.dll”. This got rid of the warning, but I don’t have any idea whether this works as intended.